Billy-Ray Belcourt, Danny Ramadan and Jessica J. Lee named finalists for B.C. and Yukon Book Prizes
Billy-Ray Belcourt, Danny Ramadan and Jessica J. Lee are among the authors who have been shortlisted for the B.C. and Yukon book Prizes.
Belcourt's short story collection Coexistence is a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Complex Indigenous lives intersect in the stories that make up Coexistence. Stretching across Canadian prairies and the west coast, we travel to reserves, university campuses and lodgings of old residential schools to meet characters learning to live with and love one another and accept the realities of the past, present and future happening together all at once.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta. His first novel is A Minor Chorus. His debut collection of poetry, This Wound is a World, is unapologetically Indigenous and queer at the same time. Belcourt won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for This Wound is a World. The collection also won the 2018 Indigenous Voices Award for most significant work of poetry in English and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
Ramadan's Crooked Teeth is a finalist for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.
Crooked Teeth is Ramadan's memoir that refutes the oversimplified refugee narrative and transports readers on an epic and often fraught journey from Damascus to Cairo, Beirut and Vancouver. Told with nuance and fearless intimacy about being a queer Syrian Canadian, Crooked Teeth revisits parts of Ramadan's past he'd rather forget.
Ramadan is a Vancouver-based Syrian Canadian author and advocate. His debut novel The Clothesline Swing was longlisted for Canada Reads in 2018 and his second novel The Foghorn Echoes won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.
Lee made the list for the Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize for her debut children's book A Garden Called Home, illustrated by Elaine Chen.
In A Garden Called Home, a young girl travels alongside her mother to visit family in the country she emigrated from. When they arrive, she notices her mother is happy exploring the beautiful landscape she grew up in. She learns about the ài hāo, or mugwort, that is used to make dumplings, the mountains and all the plants and animals that inhabit them.
Lee is a British Canadian Taiwanese writer and environmental historian. She is best known for her memoir, Turning and her genre-defying book Two Trees Make a Forest, which won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction in 2020 and was championed by singer-songwriter Scott Helman on Canada Reads in 2021.
Chen is a Chinese Canadian illustrator currently based in Vancouver.
The winners in all eight categories will be announced on Sept. 21, 2025 at the B.C. and Yukon Book Prizes gala.
Past winners include Darrel J. McLeod, John Vaillant, Helen Knott, Jordan Abel, Suzanne Simard, Ivan Coyote and Steven Price.
You can find the shortlists for the 2025 B.C. and Yukon Book Prizes below.
Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize:
- Coexistence: Stories by Billy-Ray Belcourt
- Death by a Thousand Cuts: Stories by Shashi Bhat
- A Reluctant Mother by Deirdre Simon Dore
- The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard
- Black Sunflowers by Cynthia LeBrun
Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize:
- More Richly in Earth: A Poet's Search for Mary MacLeod by Marilyn Bowering
- Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis by Gregor Craigie
- Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing by Dr. Jennifer Grenz
- May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding a Voice as My Mother Lost Hers by Minelle Mahtani
- Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir by Danny Ramadan
Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize:
- Death by a Thousand Cuts: Stories by Shashi Bhat
- A Haida Wedding by Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson with Robert Davidson
- Wildlife Congregations: A Priest's Year of Gaggles, Colonies and Murders by the Salish Sea by Laurel Dykstra
- Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation by Murray Sinclair with Sara Sinclair
- The Knowing by Tanya Talaga
Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize:
- Midway by Kayla Czaga
- wet by Leanne Dunic
- Teeth by Dallas Hunt
- The Knot of My Tongue by Zehra Naqvi
- shima by shō yamagushiku
Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes:
- Last Woman: Stories by Carleigh Baker
- Coexistence: Stories by Billy-Ray Belcourt
- Under the White Gaze: Solving the Problem of Race and Representation in Canadian
Journalism by Christopher Cheung - Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love by Sarah Leavitt
- The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor
Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize:
- A Garden Called Home by Jessica J. Lee, illustrated by Elaine Chen
- A Face is a Poem Julie Morstad
- This Land Is a Lullaby by Tonya Simpson, illustrated by Delreé Dumont
- We're Happy You're Here by Julie Wilkins, illustrated by Brady Sato
- Lost & Found: Based on a True Story by Mei Yu
Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize:
- Crash Landing by Li Charmaine Anne
- Elvis, Me, and the Postcard Winter by Leslie Gentile
- Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams: A Novel in Verse by Shari Green
- Picture a Girl by Jenny Manzer
- Skater Boy by Anthony Nerada
Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award:
- A Perfect Day for a Walk: The History, Cultures, and Communities of Vancouver, on Foot by Bill Arnott
- Curve!: Women Carvers on the Northwest Coast by Dana Claxton and Dr. Curtis Collins
- Untold Tales of Old British Columbia by Daniel Marshall
- Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching, and Rural Living by Marion McKinnon Crook
- Lightning Strikes the Silence: A Lane Winslow Mystery by Iona Whishaw
